The Ghost Light

Go Back In Time!

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Both of those days are history now, but during the years in between [11/9/89 & 9/11/01] "capitalism" became for me another word for maturity. I mean that I came to understand growing up as the process of resigning yourself to Reality ... the brute reality of egoism, the idiotic reality of competition, the imbecilic reality of the incentive-driven life and the duty not only to exist, but to exist with a cozy layer of lard on your ass and a protective patty of bullshit on your eyes. Two times nine, two times eleven. Like dust clouds rising from the double collapse, a special kind of consciousness billowed up from the debris of this decade, as yet unaware of itself, mine, ours: 119911. The palindrome-consciousness of my generation. A generation for whom all there was to see in front or behind were immense clouds of dust and debris. But it''s worth trying to understand it, this palindrome-consciousness. I don''t think anyone really has, not yet anyway. Its elders have gagged it. It''s supposed to just shut up. Well, maybe it can make a little noise, maybe it gets to speak a few lines, but only if they''re watered-down, sugar-coated, shrink-wrapped, and sanitized for consumption. The plan is to keep its voice stifled until the members of yet another generation grow old, petrified and contaminated, a thousand little renunciations stamped into their faces like crows-feet. And all this so that when the moment comes for this generation to claim its place in the history books and walk out onto life''s big stages, it will be too late. By then, that beautiful spirit forged by the double collapse will have been entirely co-opted, its need for air sated by snack food and other assorted trivialities. This is why I have set out here to document the phenomenon before rot sets in, before life has eaten away what is left of my innocence. I''ve had it with the sage advice of the compromised and resigned. Let me say right away-I know it''s true-our generation-the sons and daughters of the BOOM and the BADABOOM-our generation now has within its grasp the kind of power and the kind of honesty that can work the great changes, that can create real works of art. Every day I watch as our elders shamelessly extend their empire and spread their bullshit around and it makes me nearly blind with rage. Why don''t they just finish dying for fuck''s sake and take their miserable egos with them, their nostalgia, their State, their sexual liberation, their failed revolutions, their shattered illusions, their political parties, their parliaments and their putrid corpses. We don''t want any more of the historythey are writing. Here''s ours, right here!

For the children of the double collapse, the initial motivation behind the new spirit of revolt isn''t economic. It''s respiratory. It starts with a vague, unpleasant and overpowering feeling. A stifling feeling of being cornered, boxed in, buried alive! Does that do it justice? It''s a violent claustrophobic reaction to the idea that the world is a finished piece of work. That among other things, it has finally been confirmed that there is only one system of political, social, and cultural management available to humanity. You get strangely ill from having your options cut off like this; it''s a disease without obvious symptoms. Its first sign is an overpowering sense of powerlessness. Then nausea sets in, it moves up through the gut, chokes the throat and then spreads throughout the entire body. This is the malaise that is driving the spoiled children of the West as they attempt to rediscover the possibility of resistance. Was it just some kind of panic attack? I don''t think so. The last twelve years were clogged with despair. If we''re still here, it''s because we were forced to invent a reason to go on living. We had to forge an outlook that REJECTS RESIGNATION.~Camille De Toledo (trans. Blake Ferris)